Dark Tales Short Story Competition - Runner Up

It always starts with the oatmeal. Oatmeal, no matter what you do to it, remains steadfast in its oatmealness. Oatmeal has no sense of humor, and flatly refuses to develop one. Oatmeal stares back at you from the bowl, smug, steaming, daring you to come at it with a spoon and do your worst.
Eating it ought to teach the stuff a lesson, but oatmeal is unteachable. It rumbles through a person in a distracting, congealed boulder. It takes up residence in the most inconvenient places, and has an unpleasant tendency to overstay its welcome.
Grits can at least be buttered up until they respond with some common decency. Grits, thus salved, will mutter howdy do and move along. Farina knows its place completely and keeps to it. A barely used or better yet unopened container in the far recesses of the pantry are the domains of farina, and there it is content to remain, undisturbed. And undisturbing, unless one begins imagining the face on the package, that smiling servant with the steaming bowl. Unless one begins contemplating the stories farina might tell, having no doubt resided in the unexplored depths of its cupboard since the cupboard was first installed.
So, farina can be left to itself, and grits can be tolerable, which leaves one with the incorrigible oatmeal. Morning after morning the stuff appears, undrowned by milk or cream, undaunted by syrup or honey or any amount of any kind of sugar. It scoffs at cinnamon. It swallows bits of fruit whole, rendering them unrecognizable as anything remotely edible.
Bacon and eggs were asked for repeatedly, but refused to make an appearance. Perhaps, having once had life expectancies of their own, they retained some memory of mayhem, and did not care to participate in the morning ritual.
Oatmeal, therefore, remains the chief instigator, always leading to trouble. Take, for instance, the invention of the spoon catapult. As a primitive means of putting oatmeal in its place, this causes serious uproar. The places the catapult puts the oatmeal are, generally, the floor or the wall. Hitting either target, the insidious stuff clings, hardening into a decorative texture not unlike the plasterwork. Hitting a cupboard panel, however, puts the stuff in a temper. It will not stay where flung, but discourteously slides down the enamel, leaving a mucky trail as if intent on somehow working its way back up, and not wanting to get lost along the way.
The results of oatmeal upon the walls are noisy. The results of oatmeal upon the floor are also noisy, but much more interesting visually. When trod upon in that more-than-porridge-but-not-yet-concrete state, it produces considerable entertainment. Colorful stains and murky language or vice versa, acrobatics, juggling even, if the victim is loaded down with crockery.
This is where the shift begins. Creeping, like the sticky stuff working its way off the wall to become a nefarious trap upon the floor. Oatmeal, as a victim, is unsatisfying. Oatmeal, when combined with the spoon catapult, now becomes a weapon.
Timing gets added to the mix. Don't bother eating the oatmeal, don't wait for it to cool. Dig down into the still near-boiling, just getting sticky center. Fling a steaming spoonful at the bare skin coming into range. Listen to the startled shriek.
Much more satisfying than the crash of broken coffee cups.
If the farina starts telling tales, the fun will come to an end. Perhaps something needs to be done about the farina.
Or had something already been done? He seemed to recall burning the house. Not this particular house, apparently. Damned oatmeal. Always starting things. Buttering up the grits. Conspiring with the farina.
But he can no longer get to the kitchen. Quite probably it is no longer the kitchen he remembers. Oatmeal opens windows in his mind. Windows of marvelous, frustrating visions. Once he had wielded finer weapons than spoonfuls of scalding cereal. Shiny things. Sharp things. Things which raised voices in terror, rather than mere annoyance. Things which brought forth not blisters, but blood. Once, these beautiful nightmares hinted, he'd had claws.
Once, he'd had teeth. Once there had been bacon and eggs upon demand. Ham steaks, even, with properly buttered grits. With no squealing or clucking, no tsking admonitions of "cholesterol."
Had he escaped the electric chair for this? Or was it a high chair, in the old kitchen, the servants ignoring him until he launches steaming spoonfuls into their insipid, smiling faces?
The oatmeal no longer steams when it arrives in front of him. He has a vision, a memory, a dream, of a muscular young man in a white uniform, howling as he tries to scrape the clinging, burning stuff from his face.
The oatmeal is cold, a useless lump devoid of personality. Somewhere the grits are grinning from a platter of ham, and the farina is whispering, rustling inch by inch toward the front of the cupboard.
The plastic bowl cracks as it hits the floor, without the delightful ring of shattering porcelain. A voice drifts in from somewhere, out of his range of vision.
"That's why we have the warning tape on the floor. Don't go inside it for longer than it takes to put the food in front of him. He can't really throw things anymore - at least we don't think he can. But he burned Jeffery's face pretty bad not so long ago. So now he gets his oatmeal barely warm. He never eats it anyway. Swear to God I don't know what's keeping the bastard alive. He's gotta be three hundred years old by now."
"Seventy-two..." Where did that rasping hiss come from? Don't speak. It only gives them ideas...
"Don't listen to him. Near as we can figure he's actually about ninety-five, give or take a year. Birth records weren't all that accurate, and if he was born in a hospital, which we don't think he was, the hospital and its records burned down when he was about ten. Original house burned down a few years later, killed his parents, and all the servants too. They thought he was a goner as well, but turns out he'd sneaked out to go joyriding with some friends. He's been a trust fund kid ever since."
"Seventy-two..." It isn't his age. It's his score. They have no idea. Why should he try to tell them? They wouldn't believe him. Those bootleggers had laughed when he told them how simple it was. He wondered what they thought when they'd seen the morning paper.
Perhaps they hadn't connected the kid talking about gas ranges and electric lights to the terrible conflagration at the estate.
"He's really creepy." A new voice.
"Yeah. But he's really, really rich. And harmless. As long as you don't get too close for too long. And as long as no one tries fiddling his investments, everything is copacetic. We get the run of the place."
"And nobody ever tried, you know, taking over?"
"Seventy-two!" That hurt. Why try so hard? They are well compensated to put up with his eccentricities.
"Hnh! Yeah. And they all met with some pretty bad ends."
Indeed. Who knew accounting could be so dangerous? Such unexpected and unlikely ends. The septic paper cut was his favorite. So subtle. So exquisitely drawn out, back in the days before antibiotics. Unlike the fellow whose office was directly over the building's boiler room. Spectacular, but short-lived, even if the newspapers made much of him having been well cooked. Just like his books.
And he was worried about the farina, off somewhere in the back of a pantry. The help was not only telling tales, he was trying to tell them as well. Maybe they'd been eating the farina. Maybe that was it. Never trust anything packaged behind the face of a smiling servant.
Maybe it was time to stop trying to communicate, and make a statement.
Seventy-two people had cheated him, and seventy-two people had gotten what they deserved. Those were just the main targets. He didn't keep track of collateral damage, like the other workers in the office where the boiler exploded. Or the hospital fire. Which had been no more than a childish temper tantrum gone sideways, but such an epiphany! The problem with causing accidents is that when you do your best work, no one appreciates it. No one sees anything but a terrible accident.
The caretakers gathered for a party one night, out by the pool. Things got a bit noisy, but he didn't mind. They were young and deserved their fun. He was leaving it all to them. And Jeffery, who would be able to have some cosmetic surgery. The lawyer in charge of the trust tried kicking up a fuss, but once he was assured of his own substantial legacy, the will was done up all proper.
Memorial wing for the hospital too. There was a word for that, somewhere in the mess of congealed oatmeal that was once a criminal genius.
Oh yes. Irony.
The noise from the pool helped him keep track of the house's other occupants. Once he got down the stairs, he knew he'd never get up them again, but that wouldn't matter. He peered out through a crack in the blinds, and took a head count. Yes, good, they were all outside, even good old Jeffery with his poor burned face.
The kitchen was properly below stairs, though this young generation of caretakers, who never thought of themselves as servants, never understood the protocol. Just as well. He was tired of collateral damage. This was between him and the oatmeal. And the grits. And the farina.
He blew out the pilot lights and turned on all the gas. He pulled out a chair and sat, breathing heavily, playing with the matchbox. Listening to the faint sounds of the party seeping in through the pipes with the gas. Staring at the pantry door.
When he heard the farina whisper seventy-two, he struck a match and blew himself out of hell.